From the author of Happily Ever After Divorce. Notes of Joyful Journey.

Another Jewish mother

My friend Jane Moritz, who owns a successful business called the Challah Connection, wrote a delightful blog post yesterday about her son Sam calling her from college to tell her he had the flu. Trying not to panic, she asked whether he had gone to the Health Center. His response: “No, should I do that?”

Here was my favorite part. Jane wrote:

“My son. He had gone off to college knowing how to balance a checkbook, do laundry, write a term paper, speak passable Spanish, and solve a calculus problem. But he didn’t know enough to take himself to the health center when he was sick.

‘Yes, take some ibuprofen and then go to the Health Center.’

‘I B what?'”

Boy, could I relate to this story. Especially when Jane wrote that her husband had to convince her not to hop in the car and drive eight hours to her son’s campus.

Although I never liked it when one of my sons was sick, once they became teenagers there was also something intensely satisfying about having them under my wing to minister to. Suddenly these independent tough guys became compliant teddy bears who opened their mouths for the thermometer, drank their hot chicken noodle soup, and swallowed Advil on command. But not so once they went away to college, or as in the case of my two oldest sons, now working and living in the city on their own.

Fortunately I still have one son at home, now a high school senior. Last winter he and his older brother, still in college at the time but home on winter break, gave me the supreme gift of having all four wisdom teeth extracted in back-to-back procedures on Christmas eve morning. I was in my element, whipping up blender ice cream shakes and running back and forth from kitchen to family room with hourly fresh ice packs.

Is there anyone happier than a Jewish mother with someone to fuss over? And when it comes to mothers, aren’t we all?

But this, most likely, is also precisely why these kids haven’t a clue, once on their own, as to what goes into taking care of their own health. Which explains why I’ve just bought two bottles of hand sanitizer to mail to my son the teacher, along with vitamin C for the other son whose lips get chapped.

As luck would have it Jane’s company, The Challah Connection, supplies kosher gift baskets as well as other gift items by mail order, so she went right into action packaging a Get Well basket. Fortunately, Sam is now much better, and the Get Well basket has become the newest addition to Jane’s product line.